Size Matters

In my basic training experience and later in advanced training, I learned that some of the unit staff, permanant party, cadre or whatever you want to refer to them as, would pick on some poor guy to harrass as an example to the rest of us. It was usually some kid who was weaker or "different" than the rest. They would do their best to break him spiritually and psychologically under the guise of making him stronger.

It turned out fortunately for me that I wasn't the smallest guy in our company. There was one other guy that had that honor. He was a boy from New York who had lived in the city all his life, an apartment dweller. He was extremely small in stature and was physically very weak.

His inability to do even the most rudimentary exercises, physical tests or training was immediately apparent. A couple of the drill sargeants were on him from the beginning.

For example, outside of all the mess halls were training devices that looked like a ladder that had been placed horizontally on posts. To get into the mess hall we had to jump up and grab the bars and swing ourselves across the "wrungs" until we got to the other side. The wrungs were placed about 8 feet from the ground making it additionally hard for the short guys to jump up and get a hold. To make it worse the wrungs were loose and rotated in our hands as we worked our way across. If we successfully  made it across without falling, we got to go inside and eat. If we lost our grip or got tired and fell we got screamed at by the drill sargeant in front of everyone and were made to start over (usually after some pushups).

If you were unlucky enough to be behind him you had to wait until he made it across. This made for a lot of yelling of insults from the troops who were waiting for us to complete our task so they also could get to go across and eat.

I always feared going to the mess hall. Usually we were worn out from training before we got there. I was pretty strong for my size  but early on I sometimes fell. But after going through the trauma of failure a couple of times, the fear of falling and the resulting humiliation usually pumped enough adrenaline into my system to get me across.

Not so for the little guy from New York. To start with he couldn't jump high enough to grab the bars. After being screamed at during several futile attemps someone was allowed to lift him up enough so he could reach. But the dirision he received was unbelieveable. Once he was up there he would immediately have a bar turn in his hand and fall to a chorus of taunts.

I felt so sorry for him. But as the weeks of basic training passed I realized that the poor kid saved me a lot of grief. If he hadn't been there, I would have most likely become their target of abuse.

I don't really know how long he was in basic training because he was sent to an extended basic training company when the rest of us were completing ours. My last image I have of him is his being marched around with heavy chains wrapped around his neck to "make him stronger".

At the end of basic training we had to complete a PE Test which included the overhead bars. I lived in fear of failing this test. But as it turned out the bars of the PE Test didn't rotate making it 100 times easier to get across. The ones at the mess halls were just an additioanl form of physical and emotional torture and abuse.